A number of pedagogical arguments support self- and peer-assessment in language
classrooms to improve the quality of learning by students’ involvement in the final
judgments of one’s work. Considering editing as a method of communicative
testing of writing, this study aimed at finding out whether self- and peer-editing of
assignments could result in the improvement in Iranian EFL students’ writing skill.
For this purpose, 90 sophomore English students at Shiraz Islamic Azad University
were selected and assigned a topic to write about as the pre-test. The participants
were then divided into two groups and trained for assessing writing. While in the
first group, the participants rated their own writings, in the second, they were
asked to correct their peers’ writings. The participants then wrote a paragraph on a
topic as the post-test. The result of a two-way ANOVA for the comparison between
the participants’ performance in the pre- and post-tests revealed an improvement
in the students’ writing ability, and there was no significant difference between the
performances of the two groups implying that self- and peer-assessment can help
the EFL learners equally to improve their writing.